On Friday August 17, 2007, I would pick up the Christian Cross of
St.Andrew and station myself on the overpass at the junction of
Interstate 240 West / Interstate 40 West / and Interstate 26 West
to Spartanburg , South Carolina. My continued thought on this day
as I waved and listened to the continuous honking of the cars, bus,
trucks and even Police , State Troopers and Emergency vehicles flashing
of their lights and sirens as they passed by ; how could anyone
in their right mind not understand that there is a love in this
Southland for our flag ? Just as I was in contemplation over this
matter, a bright red SUV would pull up with Missouri license plate
tags on it. The driver, a middle aged Black man would roll down
his windows and ask if I would mind taking a picture with his family.
Woody, he asked me to call him, although his name was James, said
to me that he had gone three exists down , and the conversation
that he was having with his family compelled him to turn around
and come back to where I was. His children it seems could not understand
why a Black man would be standing over a bridge in the South waving
a Confederate Flag. The irony was that Woody had been told by his
grandmother that her very own grandpa had been a Confederate soldier,
and he had never seen fit to tell his children this fact until this
very day. He went on to say that there had been a great sense of
pride when she talked of it , but that he had been educated in the
Missouri public schools just as his children are being taught, and
that there was never any mention of the Black mans role in the War
Between the States, other than that Abraham Lincoln had come South
to free the slaves, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was a
testimony of that fact, end of story. He said that he had wanted
to speak of this in class, but that the tone of the teachers conversation
gave him a sense of shame ,and that he just let it go ; but not
today !

Woody's youngest baby girl would ask me why did White people
hate Black people so much in the South if we fought by their side
as I and her dad now proclaimed. I told her that Sam Cullom, a
Black man served loyally in the 8th Tennessee Infantry, not because
he was forced to, but because of the love that existed between
him and the White man he called Master , was family and friend
, and that his homeland had been invaded , and furthermore that
all of the men around him who looked like him expressed as much
pride in their duty as any White man to fight for their homeland,
the Southland of America, and knew that if they performed their
duty in whatever capacity , this man would do right by them, they
had his word ; furthermore the hate that she asked me about did
not really surface until after the War, during the period of so
called Reconstruction , and compounded with the complicity of
a dejure government that established the public school system
and the so called Freedman's Bureau , began a modus operandi to
divide and separate not only the African from his place of honor
amongst his Southern White family , but also forced young White
children to remember their ancestors with shame. The consequence
of these actions I told this family is that today , the Southern
Black man has been stripped of the honor earned by his ancestors
under the flag that I bore, and that further , hostile courts
acting on political and social pressure from those who hate all
things Southern, support by their rulings, the false assumption
that it is the will of the majority of Southern Black folks who
have had no forum in these matters, other than the poverty pimps
who have sold out to Northern interest in the South , who claim
to represent the total will of the Black populous. I hug them
all , and told them to check out the history of Missouri, and
that they would surely find men and women just like their grandpa
who had served loyally and willingly the Southland of America.